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Page 332
Chapter Seventeen
The day of the jousting dawned clear and fine, as so many days before had. The weather had been remarkably dry and mild through the entire autumn and winter. In the long hours of the night, while Alinor lay carefully still beside her sleeping husband, she had occasionally prayed for rainheavy, pouring rainbut there was no conviction in her prayers. It could not rain forever, and the moment the weather eased, if only to a drizzle, the tourney would be held. Just as uncertainly, Alinor at one moment prayed that Ian's knee would not be able to withstand the shocks of jousting, and at the next that it would be totally unaffected. If she could have believed that injury to his knee could keep him out of the melee, she would have been more wholehearted about her prayers. It was far more likely that he would fight anyway, crippled or not.
The jousting did not arouse the same terror in Alinor as the melee. There was much less chance for treachery in jousting. Although she did not doubt that some of the men who challenged Ian would try to kill him on the king's instructions, Ian was no novice in the art. If he was not as deadly a jouster as Simon or Pembroke had been in their youths, because his slender body did not carry the same weight, he was nonetheless very skilled. She had seen him joust against Simon before Simon's illness. It was a common sport for them in those days. Simon said he needed the exercise; Ian said he needed the experience; both simply joyed in the activity, and Alinor's initial nervousness that one or the other would be hurt by accident had soon dissipated

 
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